I thought about it a little more. No, my basic plan was still possible. We could have a rescue group and a distraction group. We just might have to join up afterward instead of having the distraction group get away quietly.

No, better yet, I thought—only risk the people who can take a lot of damage and whose powers allow them to get in and get out quickly.

“OK,” I said, “here’s the plan now that I’ve got an idea of what’s going on.”

Well, the gun shouldn’t become a problem, I told myself, not if Cassie’s around to control it.

On the other hand, I thought, you could argue that it might be even less of a problem if Cassie and every one of us completely ignored it forever. In fact, thinking about it abstractly, you could argue that Cassie’s very existence was a problem. If (as government scientists suspected) spliced in DNA caused the Abominator citizen’s mark to be written as a structure in her brain, reverse engineering it would open up the possibility of humans using truly horrible technologies.

Plus, what if aliens wanted it too for some reason? If anybody, they ought to have access to Abominator technology and the ability to remake it, right? On the other hand, Grandpa had implied that outside of their appearance on Earth, the Abominators had been gone for a while.

Haley’s lips twisted. “Are you sure you want them to connect? Remember when we flew into space and that robot attached itself to the ship? I don’t want anything like that to happen. Especially not right now.”

I remembered it very well, and I could see her point. Technically though, the gun wasn’t anything like that robot.

Arguably it was worse. The robot had just wanted to escape while the gun (at least the way Cassie described it) took joy in destroying things.

So if I was going to use the ship to boost the gun’s range, I needed to start carefully.

I reached out, detached the gun’s holster from the clip on the chair, and picked it up.

“Gun, can you contact the ship? I’d like to ask you some questions. It’ll make it easier to get Cassie back.”

The flight to Ann Arbor to pick up Rachel and Jaclyn took less than 10 minutes.

We picked them up at a small lake Rachel had called “Barton Pond.” Whatever it was, it was large enough for me to find from the air, and float over while they boarded. Plus it was dark enough out that we wouldn’t be too obvious.

They were in costume. All in white, Rachel’s gun hung from her utility belt. Jaclyn’s costume was purple, as ever, and unlike anyone else on our team, she wore a mask instead of a bullet resistant hood.

Being basically invulnerable, she could do that.

As they pulled on their seat belts, Jaclyn said, “So, do we have a plan this time?”